Back From the Dead

self-released;
2012

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The music of Chicago MC Chief Keef will sound intimately familiar to anyone that has heard a rap album or listened to the radio in the past few years. Back From the Dead, his breakthrough mixtape, is loud, rough, unrelenting, lurching, and undeniably the child of Waka Flocka Flame and producer Lex Luger's indelible Flockaveli. Considering Keef is 16 years old, you could almost use the world "child" literally. But for all its familiarity, the mixtape is noticeably alien, with the young Keef leaving behind Flocka's headbanging intensity for a delivery and presence that is unsettlingly calm and unemotional.

Back From the Dead likely refers to Keef's recently being released from prison, where he served a few weeks for allegedly firing a gun at Chicago police officers. But if you read the title more literally to mean that Keef is something like a zombie, it's maybe even more appropriate. Surrounded by beats from producer Young Chop that are stuffed with the sound of gunshots and Keef's choice ad-lib, "bang bang," he's close to stoic throughout, stalking expressionless through the streets. We usually think of this type of music as fight music or party music, and though Keef's singles certainly don't inspire people to stand and stare at each other, his dead-eyed delivery gives post-crunk music a decidedly new vibe, one that goes about threatening the listener not through aggression, but the chilling lack thereof.

The aggressive antisociality that fueled Flockaveli or the 2004 self-titled debut album from Atlanta teens Crime Mob is internalized and subsumed on Back From the Dead, and it's evident immediately on the lead-off track "Monster", where amongst a hail of bullets and rolling hi-hats Keef coolly raps, "We just do our thang, and the feds watching/ All we do is turn up, we some damn monsters." It continues from there-- on "My Niggas" he more or less talks his way through the chorus ("Please don't disrespect my niggas/ Cause we gon' squeeze a lot of fucking triggers") and on "Winnin'" he issues the album's most direct threat: "Fuck with my family, and you are finished." Neither the sentiment nor the wording is unfamiliar in the context of street rap, but Keef's laissez-faire approach to the type of things that most rappers seethe about has breathed new life into a sound that is still dominating rap despite a stretch of diminishing returns.

Keef's calling card is his innate laid-back aura, but the mixtape succeeds thanks to more than just that. For one, he may just have one of the most singular flows in rap, a bouncy cadence that often finds him trampolining on the last syllable of his lines. He displays this best on the single "I Don't Like", where he uses Young Chop's bass drum as a springboard to punctuate what may be the catchiest rap chorus of the year. Rappers such as Pusha T, Meek Mill, and Wiz Khalifa have all already taken to Twitter to shout out Keef's music, and it wouldn't be a surprise to hear his flow slowly infiltrate the rap world. Then there's Young Chop, who recently signed a publishing deal with Warner Bros., and with good reason. His beats are as musical as they are hellbent on destruction, and many of the tape's best songs ("I Don't Like", "Save That Shit") are driven by his melodic ear.

Keef is on the verge of becoming a very big deal, and Back From the Dead will serve as a visible reflection of both a city that has seen an obscene number of murders in 2012, and the sound that has been the backbone of rap music for years running. As sociology, the mixtape reinforces just how and why violence is rooted in underclass communities, and though Keef has already been blamed for its perpetuation, at the age of 16, he's still years away from fully understanding the context in which his music exists. As art, the tape shows that, despite continued oversaturation, the music that Waka hath wrought still has interesting places to go.